I'm not a fan of the smartphone app requirement (as opposed to, say, a web app requirement), not least because it presupposes ownership of a smartphone. But I

I'm not a fan of the smartphone app requirement (as opposed to, say, a web app requirement), not least because it presupposes ownership of a smartphone. But I _think_ the intent is for "normal people" to be able to know at least as much about their own car and its behavior as the manufacturer does, and more importantly to know what it is their manufacturer knows. Importantly, this is all about data that got shipped off wirelessly to the manufacturer and does not reside in the car itself anymore. The media console approach would require the existence of such a console and for the media console to connect to "the cloud" to retrieve the data. Possible, presumably, since the car is connecting somehow to ship the data out to start with, but I'm really not sure what the tradeoffs are there. The standardized port idea unfortunately suffers from that last problem too: it relies on the car itself to make a connection to "the cloud"; depending on what's going on with the car that may or may not be possible, I'd think.